Life Without a Recipe

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  It seems that evasions and denials belong to the grown-up world. My three-year-old wants unsoftened answers.

  “Where is Jiddo?” Gracie asks each night before bed. “I can see him?”

  I make stuffed-animal voices, dance her slippers around on my hands, sing “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” stalling for time. But she asks again, “Where he go?”

  “Well, he’s gone, Sweetheart. For now. Jiddo died.”

  “Where is died?”

  “I don’t know, Sweetheart,” I say in a kind of surrender. “I wish I did. No one really knows.”

  “About died? No one?”

  “Not really.”

  She thinks about this, her solemn eyes resting on mine, trying to imagine there might be something that not anyone knows. “Not even Daddy?”

  I stroke her curls back. “Not even.”

  I think this will be the beginning of a difficult metaphysical discussion; instead, she says, “Can I have some gum now?” She sinks onto the pillow beside me, arms tucked beneath her head. For this moment, we lie still, side by side on the bed, gazing through a transparent ceiling, into stars upon stars. Children know you have to live inside worlds of questions—only the adults forget and think they have to make up answers. Who made you, I want to ask those stars.

  I send Travis back to offer another five thousand on the house, though he resists at first, warning gently that it isn’t going to work and the house isn’t worth it in any case. When that’s turned down flat a few days later, I storm around, something inside of me stabbing away. I stand in the kitchen by the loud fridge, glaring over the counter, which opens, for some reason, into our shared office-porch. “That could be our house now! Why doesn’t she know that?” I’m joke-shouting—only most people probably couldn’t tell just from listening to me.

  Scott squints at some online story about sharks and surfers. “Unless she wants her asking price.”

  “She’s torturing me!”

  “Yes, she’s torturing you.” Scott smiles at me. “Or another way of looking at it is she’s being direct. She told us what her price was, and she’s sticking to it. Unlike some people.”

  Is it obvious how this will go? How Bud’s house fever grabs me, simmering up, how I will send Travis back again and again, to make small, additional offers that eventually approach the full asking price. A series of mad offers and refusals. Yet, while I’m in it, I don’t let myself look at what’s happening. Unraveling. I can’t stop wishing. It isn’t the house I love—it’s the sadness. I even understand why the owner isn’t selling—she can no more let go of grief than I can.

  I lower myself into the chair, scrape it forward, rub my fingertips over the thin gold sovereign that hangs around my neck—a memento from Bud. My memoir lies dormant and half-abandoned in its far corner. I open the file and try to find my place again, start writing. Stop. Decide I can tell this story without mentioning Bud’s death—just skip right on over it. It’s my book, goddamn it, and if I say so, he never has to die at all.

  I type and cut and rewrite and give up. Go into the kitchen. Return with a slice of cardamom cake. Turn my chair firmly toward the computer screen. It’s like peering into a fun-house mirror: words and images and thoughts and memories emerge on the page, but never in the way you expect. You imagine the story you will write—it feels as effortless as gliding on ice—but then you begin and the words turn dense and cumbersome and it’s like hacking through a forest with a butter knife.

  It’s always been like this for me, but now it’s even worse. The words sink back into the foliage, wild and scattering. There’s a large, shadowy figure in the forest. It shimmers darkly, bearlike, impossible to make out. I keep trying to look past it. Silently, it rises on two feet. I watch, my breath catching, trying to think how to write this. I cannot write this. I go back to the kitchen for more cake.

  New listings. Travis points out big windows, roomy neighborhoods, full, glimmering branches. He wonders, very quietly, if perhaps I wasn’t more taken with the interior design of the sea house than the actual house? He talks to me as softly as a grief counselor. I go forth, peer into refrigerators, closets, bathrooms, distracted by the details of people’s lives—their books, the shoes neatened, heel to heel, beside the bed. Each new address is a deep breath, plunging under, water snapping in my ears. It’s been weeks since we’ve traded offers and rejections, and I tell myself I’ve let go of the other house. That other place.

  We drive out to view a house in the far-flung beach town up north. I realize the sea house is in the vicinity but don’t know exactly where. Gracie is with us, laughing away, bounding through the rooms while I run after her, hoping the listing agent will think that I have things under control. “Sweetheart, do not get on that bed.” I stop in one room, swept by déjà vu, and realize dizzily that I can view the sea house through the back window.

  Gracie comes in the room and grabs my hand. “Why your face look like that?”

  I pick her up in both arms—she’s heavy—and bounce her a few times. “Oh, I don’t know, Baby.”

  She laughs, throws up her arms, and expertly slithers from my grasp. Travis leans in the entry; his smile draws lines in his face. Gracie flings her arms around his knees, nearly knocks him down, then runs from the room. Later today, he and his partner, Marco, will be trailering some horses to Ocala to sell. Unsentimental about horses or real estate, he has a direct, business-first approach to life. He’d told me recently, “Get the value lined up, the love can follow.” Bud would’ve been crazy about him, I think. Then I’m pierced by a sudden awareness of loss. I sit on a desk chair and exhale, pushing against sharpness. I turn away to squint at the corner of that window. “Somebody’s full of beans today,” I say.

  “So, hey, will you look at that?” He glances at the sea house through the back window, then perches on the edge of the bed across from me, clasping his hands loosely. “Funny thing. You’ll never guess what I just heard. The owner’s taking that house off the market.”

  I stare at him, unsurprised, yet a cold little eddy of rage snaps inside me. “After all that time and back and forth. And we offered her price. Just what she wanted.”

  He shakes his head. “Didn’t want to let go of it. Could be she figures she’ll get more money if she waits and relists it in the fall.”

  “She can do that? Just—say no, just like that?”

  “She did.” He leans forward, tapping my knee. “Hey? You okay?”

  I’m thinking about saying something about how we couldn’t afford the place, it was too small anyway, there wasn’t a crawl space or a yard or enough room to sit up in bed, how it’s really for the best. I know that we’d just made a narrow escape from an unpayable mortgage. Mostly, though, I’m just observing my own emotions with some curiosity. Once my anger passed, the house fades like a puff of smoke.

  Travis crosses his arms and settles back, unusually pensive. He sighs as though someone has told him something confounding. “You just don’t know what folks are up to in this business sometimes. I mean, look, people don’t like a lot of philosophy mixed with their real estate, but I gotta say this. I see crazy stuff happen and I end up feeling like that’s fate—you know, what happened with that house. Seriously. I think that one wasn’t meant to be. All the other stuff aside, comps and value and design—somehow it wasn’t going to be your house.” He shrugs lightly, the sun shearing through his blond razor cut.

  As I consider this familiar old sentiment, I feel another pulse of grief—the realization that some day we will find a place to buy, that we won’t be able to keep spending every weekend with Travis, letting him drive us around like a ministering angel. I say, “My dad would’ve wanted to know why you aren’t married.”

  He smiles. “Because that kind of marriage isn’t legal yet in Florida.”

  I turn my back on the window and follow our realtor out the door. Once more I stop to take in the salt air. There’s one of those big, complicated Florida skies, layered with clouds and light, palm
trees twisting and reaching in the distance like retirees in a calisthenics class. A line of pelicans drifts above the rooftops, blown in from somewhere. They hang for a moment, pinned there. Hello, buddies. A dark new form. Just one more shadow in the world.

  I feel loss prickling all over, the coolness left behind on the skin when something beloved goes, the sense of immense strangeness and possibility. So many ways to write the grief story, through tears or dreams or memories. Or houses or cakes. Losing my father is, for a while, like losing my home in the world. The soul’s seat. No house on earth brings that back. A hundred thousand ways to avoid grief—and each of these ways, it turns out, is a kind of grieving. Sorrow comes, transmuted or not, water through the barricades.

  For that afternoon, at least, I decide I don’t need a house. I’ll make my home in the trees and grass. Sit on the sand with a notebook. When the pelicans come to call, their ragged necklace laid out against the sky, we’ll examine each other, earth to air. You’ll find me writing this story, telling it all, gazing back at you as you skim past, barely moving, watching.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Powers

  Almost-four-year-old Audrey has long, tapering fingers, a haughty neck, slender arms designed for pushing away dishes. “No,” she says. “No. No. I don’t eat those thing. I don’t like those thing.”

  Almost-four-year-old Gracie sits close beside her friend at the picnic table, narrow legs dangling, watching intently, her face filled with pleasure at this beautiful new world of refusal. When I put out slices of cheddar cheese, a bowl of salty olives, some smoky chorizo—items my daughter loved a week ago—she announces, “I don’t like!”

  It seems as if humans are born into their best, wisest selves, without fears or biases, unaware of age or skin color, indifferent to beauty or deformity, ready to absorb languages, full of curiosity and adventure. But how quickly all that vastness and possibility begin to fall away. We’d heard the tales of children who would eat only white foods, or liquids, or single ingredients—“air ferns,” one friend calls them. We’d seen these kids at the table, faces drawn up tightly, a withering eye cast upon their plate. Generally speaking, if we don’t make a production of things, if we don’t assume Gracie will turn up her nose at the radish, the aioli, the sour pickles, she will take nibbles. If not a bite, she will lick it; if not a lick, then a sniff. There’s a series of pictures of Gracie at one and a half lounging on the kitchen floor eating a slice of lemon: She bites it, then winces, incredulous, then bites again. The tasting-and-wincing goes on in several frames: When I try to dispose of the chewed-up lemon, she breaks into tears.

  Bud ate the whole lemon, rind and all, biting right in as if it were a peach. He taught my sisters and me to eat the seeds, the white orange pith, the crispy chicken skin, the marrow from bones. He remembered what it meant when food wasn’t taken for granted. He was descended from a family of noble cooks and big eaters. We joked that the Abu-Jaber family crest should have a picture of a rearing locust.

  Grace and Audrey chase each other around the picnic table, ignoring the food, their cries streaking the air. A week later, my daughter will forget to refuse and once again nibble the olives. But the crusts of toast will go untouched, the tomatoes will be pulled out of the sandwich, the orange segments will be sucked down to wilted little cases and left for dead. I joke ruefully that I’m going to start an organization that will feed the whole world—the Kid-Rejected Food Bank. Then I spend an extra twenty minutes removing even the thinnest pips from the cucumber, without needing to be asked, because I know—she won’t eat the seeds.

  The doctor wheels the stool up close, her cool blue eyes intent on mine, and says, “Tell the truth: What did you eat today?”

  My gaze loosens up: I travel mentally to our Formica and particle board kitchen with the curling floor tiles, think of pouring batter into the waffle iron. Gracie hanging onto my leg. It began nearly the moment she was ready for solid food, the pancakes and waffles, the banana breads, the baguettes and encrusted scones, pull-apart biscuits, the brownies. We stir, gazing into the bowl, inhaling whiffs of cinnamon and vanilla. Gracie’s compact body hums with an audible pleasure. There’s no fast food, but there is this steady daily procession of baked goods. And, I admit to my unsmiling doctor, not many vegetables.

  Her brow is tipped forward in her hand; I see the dismay of someone who’s heard it all yet continues to hope. “Your blood pressure, your blood pressure,” she murmurs. “I can put you on medications or. . . .”

  “Or?” My paper jacket crinkles as I stir on the table, a blip in my voice.

  “You can lose a few pounds and stop eating all that sugar.”

  The chill of the office seeps under my paper garb; my feet go cold. “Oh. Uh.” My hands snake around my middle. “Do I have to?”

  I consider Lenore a friend, forward-thinking and restrained—her medical advice is usually doled out in thoughtful measures. “A little sugar is one thing—but a lot?” Her pale irises fix on mine. “It hammers you. Your body can’t handle the overload. You get inflammation and insulin problems. Weight gain is the least of it. There’s a cascade—elevated blood pressure means hardening of the arteries means heart disease.” She trails off, intimating dismal ends.

  But I don’t know how to lose weight, I tell her, almost begging, feeling useless and wimpy. I literally cannot imagine not eating sugar. Our new house has a fine oven made for baking. And since Bud’s death, I’ve had trouble finding my way back to dinner: It doesn’t taste quite the way it’s supposed to anymore. The ancient war between Bud and Gram, dinner and dessert, has lost its balance. No more waking up from a nap to the scent of onions, lamb, and okra—Bud’s tender mia bamia stew, filled with tomato and garlic. Such moments were rare in grown-up life but still possible—the lure of waking into warm scents, anticipating the meal cooked by someone who loved you. Now, instead of cooking, I pull out a few quick bites of this and that for our dinner, then bake a chocolate tart and hand-whip a bowl of cream on the side.

  Years ago, my grandmother’s death had taken me, like a guide, into grief, and then led me safely back out of it again. Now I lean on her ghost—the one she’d promised would haunt my messy room—for consolation.

  There were times when my grandmother’s baking was the greatest good—witching hours when the colored crystals and grain of the dough were indistinguishable from brushstrokes. Which is part of sugar’s hold on me—such big pleasure, not only dessert but fairy dust. On the last morning of our trip to Paris, years ago, before my grandmother and I were to catch our flight home, one lonely pastry remained uneaten. A fluted cream puff preserved in the sort of clear clamshell box that florists used for corsages. I’d held it up to the light, peering into the box, examining the scroll of petals.

  I understood Grace’s passion for baking, her art. Like painting or singing, pastry seems to transcend usefulness. The opposite of nutritious, people call it “decadence.” Or “sin.” Dessert is lovely because it’s transgressive. It exists for pleasure, for itself—echoing Grace’s instructions throughout my childhood: Create your own meaning. Wait for no one.

  I’d wanted to take that frosted orchid back to America and keep it forever, but Grace had said no. “It won’t be good if you wait. Eat it now or forever hold your peace, dahlin.” In the hotel room, on the side of the bed, my grandmother and I cut into the cake with a knife borrowed from room service. We ate the crisp scrolls with our fingers, inhaling oranges and sweet cream, closing our eyes.

  Lenore gives me a scrap of paper with a name and a date on it. A great speaker, she says. This will help motivate you.

  I am chastened, mind-numbed, bones buzzing as I walk out of the office, recalling the mournful set of Lenore’s mouth, the way she shook her head over my test results, as if refusing them. Cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure: no, no, no. “Don’t you want to set an example for your daughter?” she had asked. I will change, I vow under my breath. I lower my head, repentant. I will change my ways. Vegeta
bles, I murmur, a supplication. Vegetables, vegetables. And no more sugar. Even if offering something sweet out of an oven feels almost exactly like doling out love.

  Grace was the fountainhead, the wellspring of sweetness in the world. She’d lived through the Great Depression, raised a daughter on her own, worked without respite for years. She knew the importance of a little sugar in life. It was her mission to make sure that her granddaughters never went without.

  Her apartment had a crawl space in the ceiling. It opened with a neat ladder that folded up like a trick. Up the ladder went Gram, her plump hips visible as her upper half disappeared into the ceiling. She brought forth armloads of candy. In an apparently perfect union of form and function, she poured her granddaughters shot glasses of M&Ms. So easy to eat, so pleasingly crushed between molars. They were so small and so many and so colorful, it seemed you could lose entire days sprawled before her grand old TV in its cabinet, crunching, crunching.

  Whenever she visited, her first order of business was to “run out for some staples.” Grace loaded a few granddaughters into a cart and wandered the aisles, picking up a loaf of bread and carton of milk before veering to the candy aisle, where she told us to pick anything. A moment of such freedom it was almost psychedelic. The cart filled: licorice whips, butterscotches, and nonpareils. We grew uninhibited and threw in all sorts of exotics—candy dots on paper, red-hot dollars, orange marshmallow “circus peanuts,” chocolate cigarettes wrapped in candy bands.

  “Gracious.” She admired the bubble-gum cigars. “How cunning. What won’t they think of?”

  “This is so cool, Gram. Mom and Dad never let us do this.” Bud was suspicious of sugar and loved to claim he never ate “white food.” The pleasure of the palate, for him, was all salty, bready, meaty, cucumbers and yogurt and olives. But that wasn’t the whole truth. He was often forking into a cake or pie while bragging that he didn’t eat sugar. When we were a young family, each night he brought home a chocolate bar and broke it into five pieces: one for each of us.